finding her way at 40

“Oh yeah! There she is,” says the bespectacled celebrity smiling at me on my laptop screen. She’s not referring to having found me, her interviewer, on Skype, the unconventional but practical way we two moms on opposite coasts are connecting; rather, she’s referring to herself. In the fog of mourning her mother, getting pregnant, facing postpartum struggles, and getting pregnant again in quick succession, bubbly, career-focused Jennifer Love Hewitt couldn’t recognize herself—not that she had much time to try.

“I worked [on ] when my daughter was 8 months old up until my son was born [nine months later],” she tells me from an area off her dining room in her home. It looks like a confessional space from the —but hip, not hokey—with a map of New Amsterdam on a navy wall with a damasklike gold pattern. She’s wearing a gray shirt with tiny, colorful flowers sparsely scattered, and not a stitch of makeup, for which